Concepts of empathy, sympathy and compassion are often confused in a variety of literatures. This article proposes a pattern-theoretic approach to distinguishing compassion from empathy and sympathy. Drawing on psychology, Western philosophy, affective neuroscience, and contemplative science, we clarify the nature of compassion as a specific pattern of dynamically related factors that include physiological, cognitive, […]

Many human behavioral and brain imaging studies have used narratively structured stimuli (e.g., written, audio, or audiovisual stories) to better emulate real-world experience in the laboratory. However, narratives are a special class of real-world experience, largely defined by their causal connections across time. Much contemporary neuroscience research does not consider this key property. We review […]

A central challenge for cognitive science is to explain how abstract concepts are acquired from limited experience. This has often been framed in terms of a dichotomy between connectionist and symbolic cognitive models. Here, we highlight a recently emerging line of work that suggests a novel reconciliation of these approaches, by exploiting an inductive bias […]